One of the nice things about getting older is that I no longer surprise or disappoint myself as much: now, I start something knowing I’ll fail to follow through, so I don’t feel the need to kick myself over it. When I started using the very nice Ajax tagging feature in my lovely new aggregator Gregarius to add a topost tag to interesting posts that I ought to write about, before using the so wonderful it makes me laugh double click to mark read plugin to banish them from my sight, I knew right away that there would be a <ul> in our future, and so there is:

QOTD: This is, as the woolly mammoths said right before they froze solid with the contents of their stomachs still undigested, a bad sign.

Close Other Tabs must die: it’s a shame that Firefox has so many brutal traps for the unwary and uncautious, but it’s awfully nice to be able to rework the UI with just a little CSS.

QOTD2: Opensource’s central dogma is “scratch your own itch”, usability’s central dogma is “you are not your own user.”

The Zen of Microformats: I need to do some serious thinking, to like the idea of “do the easy 80%, and then plan to ignore the hard 20%” since that’s exactly what I hate the most about several macroformats I struggle with all the time.

Still enthusiastic about RDF: if it’s really as useful as many very smart people say, then easy and solid tools, and maybe a public store of interesting data to get started on, really ought to be all it needs to take off.

I, Robot.txt: if you fetched the RSS feed for this post before what I assume was a corporate editorial comment was edited out, you would have seen navigates to http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/[DO WE HAVE TO USE A SPECIFIC SITE? CAN WE KEEP IT GENERIC], which for all the bad things it says about how unauthentic and unindividual Infrablog may be, amuses me so much that I’ll probably have to start inserting my own lawyerly editorial comments in my posts. In all caps.

Akismet: Matt Mullenweg’s web service for cleaning the spam out of your incoming comments. I’m amazed at the numbers: currently, 79% of what it sees is spam. Of course, if you don’t have a problem, you’re not likely to use it. Not counting comments that skip my forced preview, which are quite literally just another GET to me, I probably see something closer to 1%.

Over and out: Srijith.K pulls the plug on TriNetre. I try not to argue when someone realizes that they don’t want to have a weblog any more, but that puts a big hole in the number of weblogs accepting PGP-signed comments.

ICANN’s proposed changes to IDN registration: when the best thing Paul can say about your proposal is that since it is phenomenally unlikely that these rules will ever be enforced, the fact that the are confused and technically flawed may not be all that important, you’ve got problems.

Spam Barriers (Redux): I suspect that Blogger’s got their anti-spam-posting CAPTCHA tuned close to right, since on a mailing list that includes suspect spammers there are complaints that it’s too strict, and on a ping-consuming list there are complaints that it’s not enough. If everybody vocal is unhappy, you must have hit the sweet spot.

But the WiFi is free: I really would like to know why the same people who want to make their living off the web absolutely, and very loudly, expect that they should never have to pay to access it.

CoLT 0.9: a tiny Firefox extension that adds a “Copy Link Text” item to the context menu for links. I love tiny extensions that do one simple thing well.

And of course there was more, much more, but expecting myself to link to, and write about, everything that interests me is another thing I don’t really seriously do these days.

Update: bleah, my server seems to have decided that building individual entry archives, even one at a time, is just too much work. Apologies for any annoyance that causes.

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I’d make one of those inane ”We’re #1” comments, but really, they’re just tools. Feel free to bang if you need some advice–not that I think you need it–or looking for something I’ve got hanging around. Been out of things the past few, but WordPress development doesn’t move that fast. Yet.

Oh, I do know: I think this is my seventh WordPress install, my fourth that made it clear to ”good enough to go live,” and my second that would have been fairly easy to trip over. One of those had a fairly good post in it, about how tools do affect how we use them, and how we should pay more attention to that than we do to our loyalty to them and their makers, starting from the obvious way that the big shift of people from Blogger to Movable Type resulted in a shift from several ”a link and a snark” posts that fit well in monthly archives to essays that have left so many of us rarely posting anything, but I’m pretty sure it’s gone now.

The threaded comments feature of having replies progressively smaller is another nice, and intentional, example, subtly encouraging people to reply to the post and pay attention to me, me, me!, rather than going off on tangential threads, but I think I’m going to have to scrap it pretty quickly, because down here at number four it’s already small enough to hurt trying to see what I’m typing.

And as it happens, while you were typing that, I was rummaging through the Theme Browser, wondering if I would find a ”WPGettysburg.”

If you reply to your own comments, I’ve found you can make one or two posts last for a month or so.

It’s Brian’s Threaded Comments, just a plugin file and a replacement for comments.php if you’re willing to live with some plugin-related compromises, like a bunch of error handling in the JavaScript in case you deactivate the plugin, and the way the images are served out of the plugin PHP file (a couple of compromises I think I’m willing to live with until approximately Sunday afternoon).

The one I mentioned above was never released. It was more an experiment for duplicating not just the look but the functionality behind a typical MT blog. Some of that work found (or will find) its way into plugins.

I tried to refer the MT ports to dev.wp-themes.org, but folks over there refused to put them up since MT is proprietary software and porting its themese is ’illegal’ or something. I didn’t quite understand it, cause its just some CSS !

I trust the themebrowser is different from dev.wp-themes.org, but I don’t know how to go about getting your themes listed there. Would appreciate feedback on it.

MT is proprietary software and porting its themese is ‘illegal’ or something.

Probably not illegal–considering the number of ports I’m aware of–but you are limited in how you can distribute them. There is a strong bias towards the GPL in WordPressLand, and any theme based on an original MT template can’t be distributed under it or compatible license. At least not until the MT folks decide to re-release them under such a license. This is in part why I never made my version of Gettysburg available.

Note you’ll run into this same issue on WP Themes, as that is the one requirement for placing themes on the site.

Far more useful than removing ”Close other tabs” (which I’ve never hit, touch wood, because I middle click to close tabs), is the inestimately useful Undo Close Tab which has saved me digging through History many times. SessionSaver is also great, but is definitely not a fire-and-forget solution – back up your profile before installing and develop an appreciation for mystery-meat preferences. I only use this on Linux where I compile my own SeaMonkey.

I go back and forth between keeping my main profile fairly clean so I don’t confuse myself testing, and using separate testing profiles, so I’ve developed an alternative for when I accidently close a tab: I just say, in my most pathetic voice, ”undo… close… taaaaab.”

I’m not quite sure whether the fact that I live alone is cause, or effect.

While I’m here, your CSS to set a different colour for visited links in entries (.entry p a:visited {
color: #b85b5a;
}) is insufficient, as shown in this post – all the links in the UL are not grabbed by this rule. Not having different colours for visited links is one of my pet peeves, although having actually poked into the CSS just now, I see that it’s more likely to be an oversight in most cases than deliberate, so thanks for for making the effort.

It’s still a default template, since I only just switched to WordPress, so it’s zero effort on my part so far. But thanks for pointing it out: I’d sort of vaguely noticed some oddness, but hadn’t yet paid enough attention to see what it was. Onto the todo list!